Lifeboat Foundation

What is the mechanism that allows our brains to incorporate new information about the world, and form memories? New work by a team of neuroscientists led by Dr Tomás Ryan from Trinity College Dublin shows that learning occurs through the continuous formation of new connectivity patterns between specific engram cells in different regions of the brain.

Whether on purpose, incidentally, or simply by accident, we are constantly learning and so our brains are constantly changing. When we navigate the world, interact with each other, or consume media content, our brain is grasping information, creating new memories.

The next time we walk down the street, meet our friends, or come across something that reminds us of the last podcast we listened to, we will quickly re-engage that memory information somewhere in our brain. But how do these experiences modify our neurons to allow us to form these new memories?

By using a special combination of laser beams as a very fast stirrer, RIKEN physicists have created multiple vortices in a quantum photonic system and tracked their evolution. This system could be used to explore exotic new physics related to the emergence of quantum states from vortex matter. The research is published in the journal Nano Letters.

In principle, if you were to swim in a pool filled with a superfluid, a single stroke would be all you need to swim an infinite number of laps. That’s because, unlike normal fluids like water, superfluids have no resistance to motion below a certain velocity.

Superfluids also behave weirdly when stirred. “If you stir a bucket of water, you typically get just one big vortex,” explains Michael Fraser of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science. “But when you rotate a superfluid, you initially create one vortex. And when you rotate it faster, you get progressively more and more vortices of precisely the same size.”

The Four Realms of Existence by Joseph LeDoux and Consciousness by John Parrington tell us a lot about human cognition, brain structure and evolution – but most of all they demonstrate how far this most tricky of quests still has to go.

By Susan Blackmore

Silicon photonics (SiPh), the manufacturing of integrated photonics on CMOS platform, has been a buzzword in the recent two years, given the technology’s promising prospect to deliver a faster, securer and more efficient solution to data centers increasingly burdened by the ever-growing transmission demand of AI. However, the potential of silicon photonics is not confined to the realm of conventional computing and communication.

Buckle up, because we’re entering the era of thinking machines that make humans look like chattering chimps! But don’t worry about polishing your resume to impress our future robot overlords just yet. The experts are wildly divided on when superintelligent AI will actually arrive. It’s like we’re staring at an AI time machine without knowing if it will teleport us to 2 years from now or 2 decades into the future!

In one corner, we have Mustafa Suleyman from Inflection AI. He says take a chill pill, we’ve got at least 10–20 more years before the AI apocalypse. But hang on…his company just whipped up the world’s 2nd biggest AI supercomputer! It’s cruising with 3X the horsepower of GPT-4, the chatbot with reading skills rivaling a university professor. So something tells me Suleyman’s timeline is slower than your grandma driving without her glasses.

Continue reading “The AI Time Machine: When Will Superintelligence Arrive?” »

Intelligence and superintelligence.

Discover the captivating odyssey of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it ventures into the enigmatic realm of superintelligence. Uncover the essence of AI and its transformative impact on our lives, while delving into the concept of superintelligence and the profound implications it holds for humanity.

Carlos Bravo-Prieto^1,2,3, Ryan LaRose⁴, M. Cerezo^1,5, Yigit Subasi⁶, Lukasz Cincio¹, and Patrick J. Coles¹

¹Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87,545, USA. ² Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain. ³ Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. ⁴ Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering & Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48,823, USA. ⁵ Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA ⁶ Computer, Computational and Statistical Sciences Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87,545, USA

Get full text pdfRead on arXiv Vanity.

The contrast between the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers longer wavelengths of light, with greatly improved sensitivity, allowing it to see inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today as well as looking further back in time to observe the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.

The James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have combined forces to image a cluster of galaxies 4.3 billion light-years away in one of the most colorful pictures of the universe ever taken.